Perovskite, a New Meta Material, Turns Light Into Power, Lasers

However, it was another Oxford lab that amped up the visual intensity of perovskite's luminescence and discovered it wasted only 30% of the energy put into it while focusing visible light into lasers bordering on the infrared end of the spectrum.

Light hitting any solar-cell film will strip electrons from the surface, leaving minute holes in the surface that drastically reduce the amount of light it reflects, making it appear darker.
Perovskite has such a high level of photoluminescent quantum efficiency that it hardly dims at all, giving it an efficiency rate of 70% when used as the emitting surface of a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser -- a semiconductor laser diode.

"These long carrier lifetimes together with exceptionally high luminescence yield are unprecedented in such simply prepared inorganic semiconductors and we note that these properties are ideally suited for photovoltaic diode operation," Felix Deschler of Oxford's Cavendish Laboratory wrote in the abstract of a paper published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters on March 24 (registration required).

Spinoffs from the NTU and Oxford labs are already at work on versions of perovskite cells to be used in commercial applications to generate power -- or light. Researchers are racing to get out products using the new meta-material -- which became known for its photo-optic properties only in 2011 -- before the next surprising revelation about its characteristics and performance levels.

Almost accidentally, for example, the NTU lab discovered perovskite also makes a good material for computer touchscreens. The researchers are investigating how it could be incorporated into portable or wearable computer devices.

Seems like a natural for optical transistors. Not sure how you would make complex integrated circuits out of this stuff however. Seems to be too complicated a substance to 'grow' it the way we do transistors...

Perovskite is actually the mineral calcium titanate, but because it and similar compounds often have remarkable and interesting electronic properties -- David Brin even used it in his scifi novel Earth to create "intelligent planets" -- the term has also come to refer to any compound that crystallizes with a perovskite-like structure. I'm not quite sure what this compound should be called, but I strongly suspect that original intent was to say that it has a perovskite structure.

As Bollinger says, the mineral perovskite is calcium titanate, but the meaning of "perovskite" has been extended to the crystal structure. In the latter sense, there are many perovskites. The article is confusing because it doesn't say *which* perovskite compounds or alloys have the unusually high optical absorption (wavelengths also not specified). Moreover, perovskites, being chemical compounds, are absolutely not metamaterials.
I'd have hoped for a minimally well-informed article bfrom EE Times, not the mishmash that I tried to decipher.

The main obstacle of today's solar energy conversion equipment is the heavy capital cost. If this can be offset by this new discovery then there will be a wide spread acceptance to using solar energy in many applications -icluding charging of EVs

@Etmax, I believe I also got mixed up and lost just as you are; if the best solar cells have efficiency of up to 25% and the most popular solar cells work at efficiency rates of 17-19%, I still can't see how a new material that converts light to electricity at 12-15% efficiency rates can be said to be more efficient than both of the first two. Maybe their strong point is the cheaper price though if that is the case then more of the latter material will have to be used to raise those efficiency rates. Please clarify further Kevin.